Josh is the most unpleasant protagonist since since Brom Hellstrom, the
almost pathologically unlikeable anti-hero of Samuel R. Delany's classic
Triton (and I mean that as a compliment). The real triumph of Galveston
lies in Stewart's nuanced and lovely depiction of Josh's gradual coming to
terms with his own, very human failings. Within this delicate framework, an
understated admission of the possibility of love is as powerful as the most
overheated exchange of sentiments or the magical healing of any number of
Fisher Kings: Fantasy novels don't get much better than Galveston.


Bulgarian SF writer Borislav Belovarski will see a novel he wrote 20 years ago finally published this year as Timeship Trilogy. It was confiscated in 1985 by the Bulgarian Communist Secret Services as ''propaganda of the anticommunist idea of Globalism''; indeed, it's about the construction of an international space station.

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Several reviews of Donald Antrim's The Verificationist (Knopf), a surrealistic novel about a group of psychoanalysts at a pancake house whose imminent food fight triggers an out-of-body experience. Says Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review,

If you could actually yank the control box from one of Antrim's busily cerebral novels, God knows what you'd find in there. Bats, maybe. An audiocassette edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, recited by Monty Python. And probably the shrunken heads of Thomas Pynchon, Nicholson Baker, Edgar Allan Poe and Donald Barthelme, writers whose DNA seems to have bled into Antrim's own.

 Beowulf
The new translation by Seamus Heaney (Farrar Straus & Giroux) -- this is the book that won Britain's Whitbread Award a couple weeks ago, by one vote over Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban -- has been released in the US and is reviewed by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post (20 Feb), who opens with quotations from J.R.R. Tolkien; and by Edward Hirsch in the Los Angeles Times.

''Mr. Spaceman'' is not exactly a satire, and some of its jokes have been done better in Vonnegut or in Halloween episodes of ''The Simpsons.'' But it works because Butler has created a central character who is warm, memorable and fully drawn. Desi is the most likable, engaging and human of aliens.